The Complete Story of Civilization

8827 Pages·2014·73.68 MB·English

by  Will Durant

TO ARIEL
Preface
I
HAVE tried in this book to accomplish the first part of a pleasant assignment
which I rashly laid upon myself some twenty years ago: to write a history of
civilization. I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the
contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of
mankind—to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects,
the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the
experiments in government, the aspirations of religion, the mutations of morals
and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the
wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art. I do not need to be told how
absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception; for many
years of effort have brought it to but a fifth of its completion, and have made it
clear that no one mind, and no single lifetime, can adequately compass this task.
Nevertheless I have dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this
undertaking, it may be of some use to those upon whom the passion for
philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue
perspective, unity and understanding through history in time, as well as to seek
them through science in space.
I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate
longitudinal sections—economic history, political history, religious history, the
history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history
of music, the history of art—does injustice to the unity of human life; that
history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as
analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each
period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.
But the accumulation of knowledge has divided history, like science, into a
thousand isolated specialties; and prudent scholars have refrained from
attempting any view of the whole—whether of the material universe, or of the
living past of our race. For the probability of error increases with the scope of
the undertaking, and any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic
target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique. “Consider,” said Ptah-hotep
five thousand years ago, “how thou mayest be opposed by an expert in council.
It is foolish to speak on every kind of work.”I A history of civilization shares the
presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous
spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture